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Sunday, September 11, 2005

D H Lawrence

Richard Kaye, Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, has written about D H Lawrence and Homosexual Desire.

Kaye points out that in the homosexual novel 'Women in Love', Lawrence is Rupert Birkin and the tale is based partly on Lawrence's 'clamorous relationship' with the literary critic John Middleton-Murray (Gudrun of the novel).

According to Kaye, during the writing of Women in Love, Lawrence had a sexual relationship with a Cornish farmer named William Henry Hocking in the town of Tregerthen.

"I would like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not," Lawrence wrote to a friend in 1913.

Lawrence told another acquaintance, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a coal-miner when I was about sixteen."

Kaye writes: 'Like Forster and Gide, Lawrence was fascinated by the mystique of sexual relations with working-class men.'

"The Prussian Officer" (1914) describes the yearning of an officer for the youthful soldier under his command.

According to Kaye, 'Lawrence's experiences with homosexual men were acrimonious; he once claimed that Bloomsbury homosexuals such as the painter Duncan Grant and the economist John Maynard Keynes made him "mad with misery and hostility and rage."

'...Lawrence is close in spirit to the English and American writers Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman.

'A great admirer of the American poet, Lawrence claimed to find in Whitman's Calamus poems "one of the clues to a real solution--a new adjustment. I believe in what he calls 'manly love', the real implicit reliance of one man on another ... only it must be deeper, more ultimate than emotion and personality, cool separateness and yet the ultimate reliance."

'Women in Love, a masterpiece of modernist fiction, is the novelist's most daring exploration of homosexuality through its hero Birkin's search for a bisexual ethic as a way of transcending what Lawrence considered a crisis in English culture...

'The novel itself makes implicit and the Prologue rendered emphatic: Heterosexual marriage must acknowledge man's need to have the love of another man or else all will suffer a spiritual death.

'Excised from the final text by Lawrence himself, the Prologue reveals in great detail Rupert Birkin's struggle against overwhelming homosexual longings...'